No, Lane Murdock is not a Twitter bot cooked up by the anti-gun lobby. She is a 15-year-old sophomore at Ridgefield High School and the architect of a nationwide walkout, scheduled for April 20, to protest gun violence in schools.

Murdock’s ambitious plan for students in every school in the country to leave class on April 20 — the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre — and stand in silence for 17 minutes to honor the 17 lives lost in last week’s shooting rampage in Florida, could only have been proposed by a student who grew up beneath the specter of the school shooter.

Murdock is part of a generation for whom school shootings are not a far-fetched nightmare but a reality, one hammered home with active shooter drills, shatterproof classroom windows and new shootings cropping up at an alarming rate.

“They feel like a natural occurrence, because sadly they are,” Murdock said.

Last Wednesday, when Murdock’s school announced over the intercom that a shooter had opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., some students didn't even pause.

“People were talking during the announcement,” Murdock said. “We were numb because this is so normal.”

After the shooting, she wrote and uploaded to change.org a petition that has since garnered more than 89,000 signatures, vowing to combat the complacency that follows school shootings with a national walkout. Students are to wear orange on April 20, according to Murdock’s plan.

“Orange is the color hunters wear on their vests, and it means, ‘Don’t shoot,’ ” she explained. Murdock, with a team of three other Ridgefield High students and a graphic designer in Los Angeles, are rolling out a grass-roots campaign to empty American classrooms and bring the country to a standstill for 17 minutes on April 20. A twitter account dedicated to the walkout has amassed 100,000 followers in five days. Murdock has uploaded flyers to the walkout’s Facebook page, urging students to print them out and put them up at their schools. The team is also designing merchandise, the proceeds of which Murdock says will go to the families of those killed in last week’s shooting.

In a country riven by the bitterly partisan issue of gun control, convincing every student in the country — regardless of political designation or Second Amendment views — to walk out in protest is “one of our major challenges,” Murdock said.

But the walkout, she said, is not to champion or to protest any specific response to the country’s spate of mass shootings. “We’re neutral,” she said, despite some adults’ attempts to co-opt the walkout's intent. “Some people who are trying to help and support us naturally assume we’re politically aligned. We want April 20 to be a day of solidarity for the lives lost; its about paying our respects.”

“But we also want it to be a day of discourse,” she added. “Adults fight on the internet, in the press, in politics. A lot of kids don’t, and it’s because we’re open to listening.”

Murdock, a self-professed history buff, said she was inspired by civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and the protests of Mahatma Gandhi — acts of civil disobedience that cost nothing and harnessed only the presence or the absence of people’s bodies to call attention to an issue.

“We knew we didn’t have the power or the money to use buses to bring people to Washington,” she said.

The living room of Murdock’s Ridgefield home has become an impromptu command center. She wakes up early to respond to emails and Twitter messages before going to school. She handles about five press calls a day, and checks in with the Los Angeles-based graphic designer. Though they are burying their classmates this week, Murdock hopes to connect with the survivors of the Florida high school shooting once they’ve had time to mourn.

Connecticut and Florida share a rare comprehension of each other’s horror, one that can only come from suffering the worst and second-worst school shootings in the country’s history.

“No one’s ever made a joke about a school shooting [in Connecticut],” Murdock said. “You go online and see other schools where people make jokes about them or make threats. We’ve never had that because it hits so close to home.”

Ana Kowalczyk, Murdock’s friend and a member of her team, was a fifth grader when Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “The thing I remember is the look of relief on my parents’ faces when I came home from school that day,” she said.

Five years later, Kowalczyk, 15, believes the Parkland shooting is “the one,” the massacre to evaporate the jadedness that settles once the horror wears off. “This one was the wake-up call,” she said. “I really hope that this is the one.”

On Twitter, some have taken to questioning whether Murdock is really who she says she is — a 15-year-old trying to break the cycle of shooting, mourning, business as usual.

“Some people think I’m actually an adult or I was hired by some cooperation,” she said. One Twitter user questioned her use of the word “lovely” in a tweet, which he said sounded oddly stiff, a dead giveaway the walkout was not, in fact, being organized by a 15-year-old.

“I am a teen, sophomore specifically, you can find my face and details in pinned interviews. I like vocabulary,” Murdock tweeted back.

“That was me saying, I’m a real person with a real personality,” she explained to The Courant later.

Murdock is real, not confined to the reaches of Twitter and Facebook. Come April 20, she hopes the walkout will be, too.